The Exile (19 page)

By the time Fitzgerald was done, Harper could no longer contain his disbelief, which had been rising steadily during her speech. The fact that the Agency had been cut out of the loop had done nothing to stop him from compiling evidence on his own, and he was willing to suffer the consequences for launching an unauthorized investigation if it enabled him to bring this farce to a halt. But as soon as he started to make his case, the president cut him off at the knees. To the shock of both CIA officials, Brenneman calmly but firmly ordered them to shut down the investigation, an order that essentially absolved the Sudanese dictator of any blame, regardless of whether or not he was actually responsible. When Harper tried to point this out to the president, Brenneman brought the meeting to an abrupt halt and dismissed everyone present, save for one man….

“Let me guess,” Kealey said. “Your friend Joel Stralen.”

Harper formed a gun with his thumb and forefinger and fired at him. “Good guess,” he said, then finished recounting the particulars of that second meeting. He sat quietly looking down at his drink for a while, then emptied his glass.

“So,” Kealey said, “what do you make of it?”

“I think Stralen talked the president into making a bad decision,” Harper said. “A decision based on emotion rather than facts.”

“And Fitzgerald and Thayer?”

Harper looked at him. “You tell me,” he said. “Just so I know my antennae haven't been picking up scrambled signals.”

“Based on what I'm hearing from you, I'd guess Fitzgerald and Thayer are somehow involved. Maybe not in a direct way, but certainly on the periphery. I think that whole meeting was scripted in advance, set up as a way to shut you down.”

“‘You' meaning…”

“The Agency,” Kealey said, sounding impatient. “I thought I was pretty clear on that, John.”

Harper realized at once what Kealey was doing—trying to emphasize the fact that he was no longer tied to the CIA. He was putting himself on the outside, distancing himself from the current situation. It wasn't a good sign, but Harper brushed it aside. He wasn't about to quit just yet.

“It sounds to me like you caught Brenneman off guard when you said you'd initiated your own investigation,” Kealey went on. “Is that right?”

“Without a doubt. To be honest, we hadn't managed to come up with anything resembling hard proof, either…which is kind of ironic if you think about it. If he'd even bothered to hear me out, he would have been able to shut us down for the right reasons. But the way he did it leads me to think the whole thing was a scam, set up to provide the illusion of closure.”

Kealey didn't respond right away. In the sudden quiet Harper could hear the elevated voices of the two men at the bar. They seemed to be arguing about something, though he couldn't tell what. Then the younger man's voice brought him back to the matter at hand.

“So let me try to sum this up,” Kealey said. “You think the president is up to something in Sudan. And you think he cut you and the rest of the Agency out of the loop.”

“Yes. At least, that's my best guess for the moment. And it appears you'd agree with it.”

“I probably would,” Kealey said. “From what I'm hearing, anyway.”

“Have you ever known me to relay inaccurate information?”

“No.” Kealey's eyes landed on his. “But convincing me won't solve your problem. And it doesn't sound to me like you have much in the way of proof.”

Your problem.
Again Kealey was intentionally—and unsubtly—distancing himself.

“I've got more than you think,” Harper said. He extracted a few sheets of paper from a second folder and slid them across the table.

Kealey reluctantly turned them around and looked them over. And while Harper wasn't sure how much he knew about the intricacies of international banking, he would surely know enough to realize that he was looking at the record of a wire transfer initiated one month earlier, on April 30. Sixteen days after Durant had died in West Darfur. Harper waited as he quickly scanned the lines. According to the paperwork, a total of five million dollars had been wired from the Royal Bank of Canada in Nassau to the Paris branch of Bank Saderat Iran, or BSI. Other than the timing and the size of the transfer, nothing about it seemed unusual.

Before he could say as much, Harper jumped in to explain. “All you see there is the SWIFT codes, which is why it probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense to you. But I checked them out. The money originated with the Cowan Group, an incorporated company registered in Maryland. The full amount landed in an account belonging to Saud Bahwan Holdings, a shell company supposedly based in Ankara. Everything I've managed to dig up, though, indicates that SB Holdings is actually run out of Paris.”

Kealey slid the documents back across the table. “Okay, but what does that have to do with—”

“I'm getting to that,” Harper said. “Four hours after the initial transfer, a man with the proper ID and account number showed up at the Paris branch of BSI. This man, David Khadir, met with a senior manager and started wiring the money out of France. It took about two hours to send the full five million to fifty separate accounts in a half dozen countries, including Switzerland and Luxembourg. I'm sure you know what that means.”

Kealey did. “He was smurfing the funds.”

“Right.”

Kealey took a second to think that over. Smurfing was one of the most reliable ways to hide both the source and final destination of illicit funds being transferred through the world's financial institutions. He'd learned about the process two years earlier, Harper knew, when they had worked with the Financial Action Task Force to trace the electronic funds of an Iraqi terrorist. In fact, Harper had been put on to Khadir and the wire transfer he received one month earlier after going back to the FATF to get the information, as the task force was one of the few official entities that could cut through the red tape so quickly.

He explained this to Kealey. “I brought it to their attention…and as it turned out, they already had their eye on Khadir,” he said. “The story doesn't relate to us, so I won't get into it. Suffice it to say that the FATF doesn't know everything, including Khadir's real name. He's actually Simon Nusairi, a Sudanese national who'd been living in Marseille till very recently. I've got a reasonably extensive dossier on him courtesy of a friend in Interpol.”

Kealey looked at him. “The Agency dealing with Interpol? You must be kidding.”

“Who said anything about the Agency?” Harper smiled. “I said it was a friend…but we'll get around to that later.” He started to push across another manila folder, but Kealey blocked it with his hand.

“Why don't you just tell me why you were looking into this in the first place?” he said. “How does it relate to Lily Durant?”

Harper sighed and pulled his drink in front of him but didn't bother to lift the glass. He realized to his disappointment that it was empty. “After that last meeting at the White House, I started to dig a little bit deeper,” he said, gesturing for the pretty waitress. “The fact that Stralen was involved put me onto the Cowan Group, which is actually a front for a secret fund administered by the Department of Defense. It comes out of their operations and maintenance budget. There are six of these funds, one for each regional Unified Combat Command. Essentially, the DOD set them up to finance CINC discretionary projects.” He didn't have to explain the term; they both knew it referred to the combatant commander in chiefs of the regional commands. “Usually that means training and joint exercises, but the money can be used however the commander sees fit. There's virtually no oversight. Each regional commander has access to one of these accounts, and as it happens, the Cowan Group is administered by U.S. Africa Command, the newest UCC.”

“What kind of money are we talking about?”

“A fraction of the DOD's annual budget, but it's enough to suit their purposes,” Harper said. “After the wire transfer to SB Holdings in Paris, the balance in the Cowan account was just under fifteen million dollars. I imagine the other commanders have access to similar figures.”

“How do you know this?”

“About the Cowan Group, you mean?” Harper smiled. “Before I was promoted out of Operations, the OMB accidentally sent me a copy of the report.” The OMB was a reference to the White House Office of Management and Budget, one of the least effective entities in the U.S. government. “This was when they were first setting up AFRICOM, so with all the paperwork flying around, it's not surprising they slipped up. I filed the information away and destroyed the report. They caught the mistake eventually, but they had no proof I ever received it, so the whole thing was swept under the rug. They never bothered to open a new account.”

“They may have let it slide the first time around, but they'll know something's up if you sent this as an official request through the FATF.”

“It wasn't official,” Harper said. “I've made a few friends on the task force, mostly because I gave them credit where credit was due. Thanks to my testimony in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee last year, they saw a big boost in their funding. They checked this out as a favor to me. There won't be a paper trail.”

“So how does Nusairi figure in?” Kealey asked. “How did you find him to begin with?”

“Once I found out that David Khadir authorized the dispersal of the incoming funds in person, I convinced the bank president in Paris to give us the security tapes from the end of April.”

“With a little help from your Interpol friend?”

“And gratefully so,” Harper said with a nod. “I flew over and picked them up personally, though. The bank president was kind enough to point Khadir out, and we ran the tape through our face-recognition software. The search came up empty, but MI Five got a hit and sent us what they had.”

“The Security Service, Interpol…sounds like you've been having quite the house party for spooks,” Kealey said. “How do the Brits know Nusairi?”

“He was arrested in London a few years back for assaulting a police officer during a protest outside the Sudanese embassy. Put the bobby in the hospital. They gave him a light sentence…eighteen months…but he didn't even do that much time. If I remember correctly, he was out in under a year.”

“Uh-huh.” Kealey's mind was plainly working. “He must have some major family connections.”

Harper nodded. “His uncle was Khalil Osman—the businessman behind the Kenana sugar plantation. His father, a partner in the Kenana development, headed the Sudanese consulate in London for almost two decades.”

Kealey grunted. “Did he graduate from Oxford or Cambridge?”

“Oxford.”

“Law degree?”

“Social anthropology,” Harper said with a small grin. “For all his wealth and privilege, Nusairi was a vocal critic of Bashir who developed a groundswell of support among the poor people of Sudan. They tolerated him to a point, but when he went from advocating civil disobedience to inciting riots, his family intervened to keep him from being imprisoned or worse. And even then they eventually had to disown him to save face.”

“Which I'm sure only enhanced his popularity.”

“Exactly…He became a kind of folk hero,” Harper said. “The man who renounced all the advantages of birth to champion common causes. Give him credit—he had the courage of his convictions.”

“And a violent streak.”

“That too,” Harper said. “The Bashir regime deported him, of course, and from there he dropped off the grid. This is the first we've heard of him in a half decade.”

“What does Nusairi think of Omar al-Bashir?” Kealey wondered aloud.

“Well, the protest he was arrested at was a demonstration against Bashir's regime, if that's any indication. Specifically, they were protesting the ethnic cleansing in Darfur. That was about the time it really started to get into the news and everything. The genocide, I mean.”

“So five million dollars is wired from a secret DOD account to a Sudanese expatriate living in Marseille. Why? And where did it go from there?”

“Well, I'm sure Joel Stralen could give us the answers to those questions,” Harper said dryly, a trace of anger touching his voice. “But I doubt he will. Neither will the AFRICOM commander, though I'd be surprised if he knew anything more than we do.”

“So you want to ask Nusairi in Marseille,” Kealey said, coming directly to the point.

Harper looked at him. “Our most recent line on his whereabouts is that he's in Africa now,” he said. “And I want you to talk to him.”

Kealey grimaced and started shaking his head. “I don't—”

“Hold on,” Harper said, cutting him off before he could refuse. “There are a few other things you should know before you make your decision.” Reaching into his pocket, he withdrew the second photograph, glanced at it, and set it down on the table. Pushing it over, he said, “Do you know who that is?”

Kealey managed to avoid the photograph for a few seconds. But Harper could tell that he'd already heard too much. He could read the physical cues—a slight raising of his right eyebrow, the way he leaned forward in his chair.

Finally, Kealey looked down. The man in the picture had dark hair and narrow, friendly features, and wore steel-rimmed spectacles of the kind that looked as if they might have been issued during World War II. Though Harper knew it would have been more than ten years since Kealey had last seen the face, it was apparent he nevertheless recognized him at once.

His eyes opened wide, and his head jerked up. Staring at Harper, he said, “Where did you get this?”

“Khartoum. The image was captured by a security camera outside the embassy ten days ago. I take it you know him.”

Kealey nodded absently and looked back at the photograph. “I can remember teasing him about those glasses…. It was one of our lighter moments in Sarajevo.”